With help of mimetic processes individuals, communities and cultures create the imaginary. This can be understood as a materialised world of images, sounds, touch, smell and taste. It is the precondition that people perceive the world in a historically and culturally influenced manner. The imagination remembers and creates, combines and projects images. It creates reality. At the same time, the reality helps the imagination to create images. The images of the imagination have a dynamic character structuring the perception, memory and future. The networking of the images follows the dialectic and rhythmical movements of the imagination. Not only everyday life, but also literature, art and performing arts, obtain an inexhaustible memory of images. Some appear to be stable and hardly changeable. In contrast, others are subject to the historic and cultural change. The imagination has a symbolising dynamic, which continuously creates new meanings and uses images for this purpose. Interpretations of the world are developed using these images created by the imagination (Hüppauf, and Wulf 2009; Wulf 2018).
In contrast to the general use of the concept of the imaginary, Jacques Lacan primarily emphasises the delusional character of the imaginary. Desires, wishes and passion play a central role here in that people cannot escape from the imaginary. For them there is no direct relationship to the real world. As a speaking entity, people can only develop a fractured relationship with the real world via the symbolic order and the imagination. With its help they can try to hold their own ground against the forces of the imaginary. «The socially effective imaginary is an internal world which has a strong tendency to shut itself off and develop to some extent an infinite immanence; in contrast, the human fantasy, imagination, is the only power capable of forcing open the enclosed spaces and can temporarily exceed it, because it is identical to the discontinuous phenomenon of time» (Kamper 1986, p. 32f.). This compulsive character of the imaginary creates the limits of human life and development opportunities. This clarification of the compulsive character of the imaginary is so important, it only makes up one part of the range of meanings, which describes the diversity and ambivalence of cultural visual knowledge according to the opinion expressed here.